A volunteered geographic information system for monitoring and managing urban crimes: a case study of Tehran, Iran

ABSTRACT

Crime occurrence is an ever-increasing social problem of Tehran city. Crime management for this city requires social action, public participation or community-oriented policing. In this regard, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) systems can be of great support to community policing efforts. By employing such systems, members of the society can act as active, intelligent, responsible, location-aware, mobile, and distributed sensors in order to monitor and report local crimes and generate crime data. Analysis of such data can be substantially helpful in crime management within Tehran. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a VGI-based system as a means for crime management in District # 22 of Tehran. Using this system, citizens and police departments can accurately report and analyze various information such as precise location, type, photo, date and time. Citizens’ feedbacks indicate that the system is easy-to-use (highly 55%, very highly 31%), suitable for reporting and presenting crime data (highly 90%) and reducing crime rates (highly 40%, very highly 35%), all the while providing an attractive user interface (highly 25%, moderately 45%). However, most citizens stated that the system is highly dependent in its need for prior knowledge (highly 75%). On the other hand, evaluation results by police departments show that the system facilitates the entire crime management process.

KEYWORDS:

• Community policing
• crime management
• VGI
• GIS
• participatory mapping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohammadreza Jelokhani-Niaraki

Dr. Mohammadreza Jelokhani-Niaraki is assistant professor at department of GIS and Remote sensing, faculty of Geography, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. His research area focuses on GIS and crime mapping processes.

Ramin Bastami Mofrad

Ramin Bastami Mofrad is M.Sc. student at department of GIS and Remote sensing, faculty of Environment and Energy, Tehran Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran. His thesis focuses on volunteered crime mapping.

Qiuomars Yazdanpanah Dero

Qiuomars Yazdanpanah Dero is assistant professor at department of political geography, faculty of Geography, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. His research area focuses on criminology and crime mapping processes.

Fakhreddin Hajiloo

Mr. Fakhreddin Hajiloo is M.Sc. student at department of GIS and Remote sensing, faculty of Geography, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. His thesis focuses on volunteered crime mapping.

Abolghasem Sadeghi-Niaraki

Dr. Abolghasem Sadeghi-Niaraki is assistant professor at Geoinformation Technology Center of Excellence, Faculty of Geodesy&Geomatics, K.N.Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. His research area focuses on GIS and crime-based decision support systems.